rtheless.

Ferdinand and his brothers and sister were very piously reared, and at
an early age learned to love the church and to seek it for exaltation
and consolation.

Later on in these chapters we shall see that phase of a little French
boy's training in its due relation to a marechal of France, directing
the greatest army the world has ever seen.

The college of Tarbes, where Ferdinand began his school days, was in a
venerable building over whose portal there was, in Latin, an
inscription recording the builder's prayer:

"May this house remain standing until the ant has drunk all the waves
of the sea and the tortoise has crawled round the world."

Ferdinand was a hard student, serious beyond his years, but not
conspicuous except for his earnestness and diligence.

When he was twelve years old, his fervor for Napoleon led him to read
Thiers' "History of the Consulate and the Empire." And about this time
his professor of mathematics remarked of him that "he has the stuff of
a polytechnician."

The vacations of the Foch children were passed at the home of their
paternal grandparents in Valentine, a large village about two miles
from the town of St. Gaudens in the foothills of the Pyrenees. There
they had the country pleasures of children of good circumstances, in a
big, substantial house and a vicinity rich in tranquil beauty and
outdoor opportunities. And there, as in the children's own home at
Tarbes, one was ashamed not to be a very excellent child, and, so,
worthy to be descended from a chevalier of the great Napoleon.

In the mid-sixties the family moved from Tarbes to Rodez--almost two
hundred miles northeast of their old locality in which both parents had
been born and where their ancestors had long lived.

It was quite an uprooting--due to the father's appointment as paymaster
of the treasury at Rodez--and took the Foch family into an atmosphere
very different from that of their old Gascon home, but one which also
helped to vivify that history which was Ferdinand's passion.

There Ferdinand continued his studies, as also at Saint-Etienne, near
Lyons, whither the family moved in 1867 when the father was appointed
tax collector there.

And in 1869 he was sent to Metz, to the Jesuit College of Saint
Clement, to which students flocked from all parts of Europe.

He had been there a year and had been given, by unanimous vote of his
fellow students, the grand prize for scholarly qualities, when the
F